You can't fault Gretchen Greene Dodd for being a bit sentimental about moving her longtime business from the rear portion of the mall at the Wilmington Island Shopping Center to a new location on Whitemarsh Island.

After all, the business she founded and owns - the Gretchen Greene School of Dance - had been at the old spot since 1975.

"I've been here a long time," said Gretchen in late July during an interview at her old place at 318 Johnny Mercer Blvd. "It's kind of like home to me.

"Little things like that bookcase have been in the same location since I've been here," she said, gesturing fondly at a piece of furniture sitting behind me in her office. "When I moved in, I was the only business back here. It was a ceramics shop when I moved in."

Sentimental though she might be, Gretchen expressed excitement at making the move, which was scheduled for Aug. 1.

The relocation takes her into renovated quarters at 51 Johnny Mercer Blvd. in the Cedar Hammock Office Park - the building that formerly housed Skipper's florist - and considerably more room than she had on Wilmington Island.

"We're going from two dance rooms to three," said Gretchen's daughter, Trina Stafford, who's the company director at the school.

With her lease at the shopping center expiring at the end of this year, Gretchen said she, "took the initiative to move - there was an offer out there, and we decided to go with it."

She's also relocating her dancewear supply store, The Dance Shoppe, into her new quarters, where it's being called Atrium Dancewear - a reference to the space's former life as a greenhouse.

Savannah native Gretchen and her staff - which includes her son, Travis Dodd, who's the school's recreational director - will celebrate their move with an open house on Aug. 18, 19 and 20.

The school offers instruction in tap, ballet, jazz, hip hop and lyrical dance and has an enrollment of about 300 students ranging in age from 3 to 18.

Gretchen, who danced off and on with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes during 1969-71, got her start in the dance school business in 1968 with a studio in Metter. She wound up there because of her relationship with a teacher, the legendary Marilyn Youmans of Savannah.

"I wouldn't compete with her, so I went 60 miles up the road," said Gretchen.

Commuting back and forth from Savannah, she taught in Metter for 10 years, during which time she moved to Wilmington Island.

"My neighbors were encouraging me to open a studio out here," Gretchen said, and she did, starting with 25 students and staging her first recital in the ballroom of what was then the Sheraton Savannah hotel - now the Wilmington Plantation condominiums. In the three-and-a-half decades since then, a multitude of young dancers have passed through her doors.

When I asked Gretchen how many, she answered with a smile, "I can't even begin to imagine."